It Took Them Quite a While to Find Us
Heroes Remember
It Took Them Quite a While to Find Us
There was Americans in this camp too. And this American navy
officer, he was a doctor, but he hadn’t, he wouldn’t do anything
for the Canadians. He looked after American navy people, it was
all navy people. And his, one of his men was a radio operator on
a ship, and they had made a radio in a water bottle, a Canadian
canteen and they knew that when the war had ended, the Americans
did. They told us that they’d dropped the atomic bomb, that the
war had ended. And then, well, it took them quite a while before
they found us, guess they didn’t know where the camp was. See,
we were isolated right up in the northern part of Japan. I
forget what they even called that island now. It’s a northern
island anyway. They had no way in there except by ship. The
Americans, their B-29's started dropping food down to us by
parachute. It was a while before they could get us out of there.
The paratroopers come in there and they got us down to the ocean
where they loaded us onto these landing crafts and took us onto
a hospital ship where we were disinfected and deloused. Got
American uniforms put on us. We were taken off the hospital
ship, we were taken onto the King George battleship, British
battleship. There were navy guys on the battleship, they
collected money for us. They gave us each so much money to spend
so we could get cigarettes and something to eat. We got enough
to eat because they fed us good on the ships, the American and
the British ships. But then we were taken back to Tokyo and from
there we were flown to Guam, where I was a week in the hospital
in Guam, in the navy hospital in Guam. And from there, after a
week we flew to, well we stopped over at Quajeilin for
refuelling, then to Hawaii where we were in a navy hospital in
Hawaii for about 3 days. And then from there we flew to San
Francisco. Well we were supposed to land in San Francisco but it
was fogged in so it landed in Oakland. And then we come up the
coast, up to Seattle, Washington where we were
on a ferry over to Victoria.
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